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Library and player

Your library

  • Movies and TV: libraries, search, rich detail pages, resume and Next Up, next and previous episode, skip intro and credits, chapters, and trickplay thumbnails as you scrub.
  • Music: albums, a play queue, now playing, shuffle and repeat, synced lyrics with an online fallback, and scrobbling. The now-playing screen flips between artwork and lyrics.
  • Live TV and DVR: a channel list, an EPG guide, recording with series rules, and tuner and guide-provider setup.

The player

The same player drives Jellyfin and YouTube: one control bar, one seek bar (with chapter and skip markers), the same speed control, track pickers, and keyboard shortcuts, so nothing feels bolted on.

  • mpv-grade playback through media_kit and libmpv: direct play with a transcode fallback, hardware decoding, and proper subtitle and audio track selection.
  • Picture in picture: shrink a video into a floating mini player and keep browsing, or pop it out to a resizable, always-on-top window.
  • Tune it to taste: video fit, playback speed, a control bar you can style (glass, dark, or plain), remappable keyboard shortcuts, and scrub-preview thumbnails.

Playback Info

Open the settings gear in the control bar and choose Playback Info for a read-only overlay of what is really happening, read live from mpv:

  • Play method: direct play vs transcode (or, on YouTube, adaptive vs muxed).
  • Video and audio: codecs, resolution, frame rate, bitrates.
  • Decoder: whether hardware decoding actually engaged (for example Hardware (vaapi) vs Software), and dropped-frame counts.
  • General: container, buffer, and A/V sync.

It works in both the Jellyfin and YouTube players, and stays put when you enter fullscreen.

Internet radio

Add stations by URL or search the built-in radio-browser.info directory. Organize them into groups and favorites, and reorder them by drag.

  • Live time-shift: pause and rewind a live station within a buffered window, then hit LIVE to jump back to the edge.
  • Now playing: station art (with album-art lookup for stations that report track info), an inline volume control, and background playback.
  • Radio can be cast to a speaker or TV alongside your music.

Casting

Fathom casts to Chromecast and Google TV devices (on Android). Video direct-plays when the target supports the codecs, or falls back to a transcode for audio-only speakers, with a queue and skip that advance on the device.

Requests, ratings, and watch together

  • Seerr (optional): browse and request titles, then approve, decline, or manage requests without leaving the page, with download progress shown right on the detail view. Set it up in First-run setup.
  • Ratings that matter to you: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and community scores, plus Letterboxd, Metacritic, Trakt, and others through MDBList.
  • Watch together: SyncPlay-based shared playback that interoperates with the official Jellyfin apps and other clients, not only with other Fathom users.

Server administration

Run most of Jellyfin from the app, without opening the web dashboard: manage users, libraries, scheduled tasks, active sessions, playback and transcoding, networking, branding, Live TV and DVR, and plugins.

Personalization

Light, dark, and AMOLED themes with a custom accent color, a Home layout you can rearrange, in-app updates with a Stable or Beta channel, system and in-app notifications, a Settings screen you can search, and a fully translatable interface.

Notifications

Fathom keeps an in-app notification centre (the bell), and shows an in-app toast while you're using the app. Choose which events you care about under Settings → Notifications:

  • Seerr requests: a new request (pending approval), or one of yours being approved, declined, or becoming available.
  • Download complete: when a download to this device finishes.
  • Update available: when a new version of Fathom is released.

While the app is open, Fathom checks Seerr for status changes every minute or so, so updates surface almost immediately as a toast and land in the bell. On desktop, when Fathom is in the background these also appear as system (OS) pop-ups, toggled by the master switch at the top of the section. On mobile, backgrounded events wait quietly in the bell rather than raising a system notification. Either way, the per-event toggles decide what gets recorded in the first place.